Oracle Blog

Inside Oracle's Middleware Community

Tuesday Feb 04, 2014

There was a buzz in the air at Oracle CloudWorld in San Francisco last week at the Westin on Market Street. It was a great opportunity to hear Oracle's strategy for the Cloud across Applications such as ERP, HCM, Eloqua and other as well as Oracle's strategy for Mobile. There was something for everyone with a floor dedicated to demos and numerous sessions for all interested. CloudWorld in San Francisco is just one of several locations worldwide where this event is being held. CloudWorld is slated to take place in Melbourne, Moscow, Beijing and Chicago - so if you missed last week, not to worry, it's coming to a city near you!

CEO, Larry Ellison delivered an energizing keynote in the afternoon to a packed audience. He focused on Oracle's investment in HCM and why it sees this is an important initiative and one that requires additional staff resources and greater innovation in order for us to maintain our leadership position in the market. Following his keynote, there was a good amount of time set aside for Q & A from the audience. Among the many sessions, the one not to be missed was delivered by Ray Wang, Principal atConstellation Research. He had a very well attended session that covered what a sales cloud-related product should entail (feature, function and address which business needs) .

Still want to attend CloudWorld? To register for a CloudWorld near you, click here.

Friday Oct 25, 2013

Global Perspective is a monthly
series that brings experiences, business needs and real-world use cases from
regions across the globe. This month’s feature is a follow-up from last month’s
Global Perspective note from a well known ACE Director based in EMEA.

Author: Debra Lilley, ACE Director

My first contribution to this blog was before Oracle Open World and I was quite excited about where
this initiative would take me in my understanding of the value of Oracle Fusion
Middleware.

Rimi
Bewtra from the Oracle AppAdvantage team came as promised to the Oracle ACE
Director briefings and explained what this initiative was all about and I then
asked the directors to take part in the new survey. The story was really well received
and then at the SOA advisory board that many of these ACE Directors already
take part in there was a further discussion on how this initiative will help
customers understand the benefits of adoption.

A few
days later Rick Beers launched the program at a lunch of invited customer
executives which included one from Pella who talked about their projects (a quick recap on that here). I wasn’t able to stay for
the whole event but what really interested me was that these executives who understood
the technology but where looking for how they could use them to drive their
businesses.

Lots of
ideas were bubbling up in my head about how we can use this in user groups to
help our members, and the timing was fantastic as just three weeks later we had
UKOUG_Apps13, our flagship Applications conference in the UK. We had independently
working with Oracle marketing in the UK on an initiative called Apps
Transformation to help our members look beyond just the application they use
today. We have had a Fusion community page but felt the options open are now
much wider than Fusion Applications, there are acquired applications, social,
mobility and of course the underlying technology, Oracle Fusion Middleware.I was really pleased to be allowed to give
the Oracle AppAdvantage story as a session in our conference and we are
planning a special Apps Transformation event in March where I hope the Oracle AppAdvantage
team will take part and we will have the results of the survey to discuss.

But,
life also came full circle for me. In my first post, I talked about Andrew Sutherland
and his original theory that Oracle Fusion Middleware adoption had technical drivers. Well, Andrew
was a speaker at our event and he gave a potted, tech-talk free update on
Oracle Open World. Andrew talked about the Prevailing Technology Winds, and
what is driving this today and he talked about that in the past it was the move
from simply automating processes (ERP etc), through the altering of those
processes (SOA) and onto consolidation. The next drivers are around the need to
predict, both faster and more accurately; how to better exploit the information
that we have available. He went on to talk about The Nexus
of Forces: Social, Mobile, Cloud and Information– harnessing these forces of
change with Oracle technology.Gartner
really likes this concept and if you want to know more you can get their paper
here.

All this has made me think, and I hope it
will make you too. Technology can help us drive our businesses better and
understanding your needs can be the first step on your journey, which was the
theme of our event in the UK. I spoke to a number of the delegates and I hope
to share some of their stories in later posts.

Debra has
18 years experience with Oracle Applications, with E Business Suite since
9.4.1, moving to Business Intelligence Team Leader and then Oracle Alliance
Director. She has spoken at over 100 conferences worldwide and posts at debrasoraclethoughts

Editor’s Note: Debra has kindly agreed to
share her musings and experience in a monthly column on the Fusion Middleware
blog so do stay tuned…

On Tuesday at OpenWorld we had the
honor to host a panel with GoldenGate customers: Land O’Lakes, Smuckers, and
Veolia Water. Besides giving us yummy nutrition and healthy water, these
companies have another aspect in common. They all use GoldenGate to boost their
ERP application.

Veoila Water’s Pierre
Kerrinckx came from their HQ in France for this panel and spoke to us
about the database migration project for their JD Edwards ERP system. Using
GoldenGate Veolia was able to migrate from Oracle Database 10gR2 on AIX 5.3 Oracle 10g R2 to Oracle
Database Aix 7.1 Oracle 11g R2 and did so with only 2 hours of interruption to
JD Edwards end users. Pierre mentioned, the other benefit of GoldenGate was the
ability to switch back to the old environment if needed.

Land O’Lakes’ Mark Kohls talked
about their use of GoldenGate for their JD Edwards ERP system supporting the
Purina business line. Land O’Lakes had to migrate enterprise-wide JDE Xe ERP
system to new database and application server platform with minimal downtime to
the business. While their goal was to have less than 8 hours of downtime, with
GoldenGate they limited downtime to 30 minutes.

Both Veolia and Land O’Lakes used
GoldenGate in an Active-Passive fashion, meaning that the new environment was
not used simultaneously with the old one, and the users migrated all at once.
GoldenGate provides Active-Active migration model too, if the company prefers
to do a phased migration and truly zero downtime.

Smuckers's Neal Indermuhle had a
different story to share. He talked about operational reporting for their
critical Oracle E-Business Suite and how using Oracle GoldenGate helped the
company to achieve the near real-time data they need in making critical
business decisions. Neil shared that the replication latency averages less than
10 seconds and Oracle GoldenGate Veridata is leveraged to validate
synchronization.

I would like to thank Pierre, Mark,
and Neal for sharing their best practices, and taking tough questions from the
audience. If you would like to learn more about Oracle GoldenGate’s solutions
for JD Edwards, E-Business Suite and other key Oracle Applications please check
out our new resource center with recorded video presentations and detailed white papers.